For most of the modern era, capitalism justified itself through growth. Industrial societies converted vast amounts of fossil energy into production, wealth, and rising living standards. Roads, bridges, power grids, schools, and public institutions expanded alongside the economy. Inequality and exploitation remained deeply embedded in the system, but they were partly obscured by a broader story of material progress.
That story is beginning to unravel.
Across much of the developed world, economic life increasingly feels less like construction than demolition. Infrastructure deteriorates. Public institutions struggle to perform basic functions. Ecosystems degrade. Democratic norms weaken. Yet wealth continues to concentrate at remarkable speed. Political systems seem unable to solve mounting crises while proving highly adept at monetizing them. Climate disasters create investment opportunities. Housing shortages become profitable asset classes. Social isolation fuels lucrative digital platforms. War drives markets. Collapse itself becomes a business model. If growth fails, capitalism will extort wealth for as long as possible by devising new ways to profit from disaster, conflict, chaos, scarcity, and collapse.
A useful way to understand this shift is through the concept of catabolic capitalism. In biology, catabolism refers to the process by which an organism breaks down its own tissues to survive when external resources become scarce.[1] Applied to political economy, the concept describes a late stage of industrial capitalism in which profits increasingly come not from expanding production, but from consuming the social, institutional, ecological, and infrastructural foundations built during an earlier era of abundance.
The idea draws on historian John Michael Greer’s concept of catabolic collapse. Greer argued that when past civilizations faced declining energy reserves and resource constraints, they often maintained short-term stability by consuming assets accumulated during more prosperous periods. Industrial capitalism intensifies this dynamic because it is driven by a relentless demand for profit. During the long age of cheap energy and expanding resources, that imperative encouraged innovation, investment, and growth. As growth slows and constraints multiply, however, profits are increasingly extracted from deterioration rather than creation.
For much of the past two centuries, profits flowed from building things: factories, transportation networks, electric grids, cities, suburbs, and global communications infrastructure. Capital transformed abundant fossil energy into ever-greater economic velocity and complexity. Today, that process is becoming difficult to sustain. The easiest resources have already been exploited. Infrastructure is aging. Ecological damage is accumulating. Debt is growing faster than productive capacity. Political legitimacy is eroding. Competition over energy, resources, and strategic supply chains is intensifying.
Yet capitalism’s prime directive has not changed. The pursuit of profit adapts to new conditions. Faced with stagnation and decline, it increasingly finds ways to profit from deterioration itself.
From Production to Predation
One of the clearest signs of this catabolic transition is the growing dominance of financial extraction over productive investment.
Rather than building new productive capacity, large pools of capital increasingly generate returns by stripping value from existing institutions. Private equity firms, for example, often acquire functioning companies, load them with debt, extract fees and assets, cut labor costs, and leave weakened organizations behind. Hospitals, nursing homes, local newspapers, retail chains, and housing markets have all been subjected to this logic.
Infrastructure tells a similar story. Preventive maintenance rarely attracts political attention, especially in an era of fiscal strain and anti-tax politics. As a result, systems are allowed to deteriorate until failure becomes unavoidable. Emergency repairs and reconstruction then generate large profits for contractors, insurers, and investors. In many cases, responding to disasters becomes more lucrative than preventing them.
The same pattern appears in everyday life. For decades, stagnant wages have been offset by rising levels of debt. Student loans, medical debt, credit cards, payday lending, and subscription-based financing allow consumption to continue by borrowing against the future.[2] Instead of distributing the gains of rising prosperity, the system increasingly extracts value from chronic insolvency.[3]
Housing offers one of the clearest examples. During the postwar boom, housing policy — though blatantly discriminatory — was largely oriented toward expanding homeownership and promoting social stability. Today, housing increasingly functions as a financial asset. Investment firms purchase homes at scale, rents rise faster than incomes, and homelessness grows alongside soaring property values. Shelter becomes less a social necessity than a vehicle for extracting income from a shrinking middle class.
These developments are often dismissed as corruption, greed, or policy failure. Those factors matter, but they do not fully explain what is happening. The problem is deeper — systemic. As opportunities for broad-based material expansion diminish, profit increasingly depends on extracting value from structures that already exist.
The Politics of Breakdown
Political systems respond to catabolic conditions as well.
When governments can no longer reliably deliver rising living standards and expanding public services, they shift from promoting development to managing crisis. Public institutions weaken while security institutions grow. Temporary emergencies become permanent features of political life.
The expansion of the national security apparatus after 9/11 offered an early glimpse of this trend. Surveillance systems, predictive policing technologies, private intelligence contractors, militarized borders, and sprawling security bureaucracies flourished in an atmosphere of perpetual threat. Instability and fear became increasingly profitable.
The rise of authoritarian and illiberal movements across much of the world reflects similar pressures. As inequality widens, ecological stresses deepen, and economic insecurity spreads, political leaders gradually abandon promises of collective improvement. Instead, they offer narratives centered on repression, exclusion, punishment, and restoration through force.
The “wrecking ball” politics associated with the second Trump administration and the broader Project 2025 agenda fit comfortably within this pattern.
The MAGA agenda accelerates capitalism’s catabolic dynamic. Notorious MAGA ideologue Steve Bannon openly calls for the deconstruction of the administrative state and the delegitimization of institutions and experts. In 2016, Bannon declared that his goal was to “destroy the state and bring everything crashing down.”[4] To achieve this, he pursues a strategy of “flooding the zone” with conflicting information and inflammatory narratives. His goal is political catabolism: overwhelm the public information ecosystem, deepen societal conflict and fragmentation, and undermine the political status quo. Under Trump, regulatory agencies are gutted or politicized. Public institutions are eviscerated. Environmental protections are dismantled. Civil service systems are attacked. Scientific and administrative expertise is subordinated to personal loyalty and ideological alignment.
This is not simply a matter of shrinking government. Catabolic politics does not necessarily reduce state power. Instead, it redirects state capacity away from broadly shared public functions and toward policing, border enforcement, patronage networks, resource extraction, and the protection of concentrated wealth.
Under catabolic conditions, governance itself becomes increasingly extractive. Public institutions cease to function primarily as tools for building collective capacity and instead become mechanisms for managing instability while preserving existing hierarchies amid decline. This helps explain one of the defining paradoxes of contemporary politics: many governments appear simultaneously weak and authoritarian — incapable of addressing major structural problems, yet increasingly aggressive in surveillance, policing, and symbolic displays of force.
AI — Automating Decline
Artificial intelligence is often presented as the next great engine of prosperity. Yet under catabolic conditions, AI may function more as a system for managing and profiting from contraction than as a tool for social advancement.
In an expanding capitalist economy, automation displaces labor and lowers wages, but it can also satisfy rising demand and create new sectors of employment. In a stagnant or declining economy, however, intelligent machines concentrate wealth and displace labor far faster than new viable opportunities emerge.
AI serves four core catabolic functions.
First, it intensifies extraction. AI’s hunger for energy and water is enormous. A standard AI search query or text generation task can require far more electricity than a traditional Google search, forcing utility companies to scramble to revive retired fossil fuel plants and nuclear reactors to meet rising demand. Large data centers can consume as much water and electricity in a day as a medium-sized city.[5]
In addition, human knowledge, creativity, and attention have become mined resources. The foundation of AI is collective human intelligence: books, songs, artwork, journalism, scientific research, films, and ideas — the vast accumulated knowledge of human cultures. As Sam Altman admits, AI models are trained on the “collective experience, knowledge and learnings of humanity.”[6]
Who should this resource belong to? Big tech oligarchs, venture capitalists, and Wall Street financiers extract it without permission, acknowledgment, or compensation. Will they use it primarily for the benefit of humanity or to fabricate the next great wealth extraction machine? Most AI algorithms are designed to optimize advertising, logistics, pricing, surveillance, and labor discipline. Social media platforms profit by amplifying outrage, fear, and polarization because emotional destabilization increases engagement. This is cultural catabolism.
Second, AI reduces the cost of enforcing inequality. Automated welfare systems, predictive policing, algorithmic hiring filters, digital reputation scoring, and workplace surveillance allow institutions to manage increasingly precarious populations with fewer human administrators and less democratic accountability.[7]
Third, AI supports the expansion of the security state. Facial recognition, mass data analysis, autonomous drones, biometric tracking, and predictive analytics create unprecedented capacities for monitoring and controlling populations during periods of instability.[8]
Finally, when material prosperity stagnates, AI promotes artificial forms of virtual consumption. Endless digital entertainment, AI-generated content, surrogate companionship, and immersive online environments increasingly substitute for declining access to nature, human relationships, stable housing, community, healthcare, or economic security.
Instead of heralding a new golden age for industrial civilization, AI may represent a technologically sophisticated method for overseeing and profiting from the conflicts, crises, and calamities of decline.
Climate Change and the Disaster Business
Nowhere are the dynamics of catabolic capitalism more visible than in the ecological crisis.
Industrial civilization was built on an extraordinary inheritance of cheap, abundant fossil fuels. That energy surplus made it possible to construct vast networks of infrastructure, transportation, manufacturing, and global trade. But maintaining that complexity becomes increasingly expensive as high-quality resources are depleted, extraction costs rise, and environmental damage accumulates.
Rather than fundamentally changing course, the system is increasingly finding ways to profit from breakdown itself.
Climate disasters create booming markets for reconstruction. Insurance speculation expands. Private firefighting services emerge to protect affluent communities. Water scarcity becomes a tradable asset. Entire industries develop around adapting to environmental calamity rather than preventing it.
At the same time, increasingly destructive forms of resource exploitation — fracking, tar sands extraction, deep-water drilling, seabed mining, and mountaintop removal — are deployed to maintain industrial output despite declining energy returns and escalating ecological damage.
The result is a self-reinforcing cycle. Ecological crises create profitable opportunities. Those opportunities encourage further extraction. Further extraction deepens the underlying crises. Under catabolic capitalism, environmental destruction is no longer merely a byproduct of economic growth. It becomes woven directly into the logic of profit itself.
Militarization and Global Resource Conflict
As ecological pressures mount and resource constraints tighten, geopolitical competition increasingly centers on access to strategic assets: energy supplies, water systems, critical minerals, migration routes, supply chains, semiconductor production, and key transportation corridors.
The outlines of this struggle are already visible in growing tensions over food security, freshwater access, climate-driven migration, Arctic shipping routes and energy reserves, lithium and cobalt deposits, and the semiconductor chokepoints that underpin the global economy.[9]
Military strategy is evolving accordingly. Advanced states increasingly rely on drones, cyberwarfare, autonomous systems, satellite surveillance, and AI-assisted targeting rather than large-scale troop mobilizations. These technologies allow governments to project power with fewer political costs and less dependence on broad public support.
At the same time, the line between military and domestic security functions is increasingly blurred. Urban surveillance networks, predictive policing systems, biometric tracking, militarized borders, and sophisticated crowd-control technologies bring techniques once associated with warfare into everyday governance.
Under catabolic conditions, security increasingly means protecting unequal access to scarce resources. The result can resemble a form of technological neo-feudalism: heavily fortified zones of wealth and infrastructure surrounded by expanding regions of precarity, instability, and environmental decline.
The Central Contradiction
One of the defining features of catabolic capitalism is the widening gap between financial indicators and material reality.
Stock markets can climb while production flatlines and infrastructure decays. Corporate profits can soar while life expectancy stalls. Artificial intelligence can advance at breathtaking speed while loneliness, anxiety, and social fragmentation deepen. Technological sophistication can coexist with declining public trust, ecological instability, and growing authoritarianism.
This disconnect challenges one of the core assumptions of the modern era: that technological development naturally generates social progress. For much of industrial history, the two often moved together. Under catabolic conditions, however, technological innovation increasingly serves extraction, surveillance, and control rather than shared prosperity.
The result is a society that can appear both hypermodern and surprisingly fragile.
Supercomputers coexist with crumbling bridges. Advanced medicine coexists with declining public health. Constant digital connectivity coexists with loneliness and social isolation. Billionaires pursue private space programs while aging electrical grids fail and housing becomes unaffordable for millions.
The system continues to generate immense wealth. Increasingly, however, it does so by consuming the social and material foundations that made that wealth possible in the first place.
Beyond the Illusion of Endless Growth
Viewed through this lens, rising authoritarianism, political dysfunction, corruption, and extreme polarization are not isolated problems. They are symptoms of a deeper impasse. Industrial civilization is colliding with the limits of a profit-driven economy designed for perpetual growth and sustained for generations by abundant, inexpensive fossil energy.
Humanity now faces a convergence of crises: climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, resource depletion, extreme inequality, food and water insecurity, mass displacement, and the growing risk of global pandemics. Each problem amplifies the others. Together, they place increasing strain on the systems that support modern life. The danger is that a system increasingly committed to profiting from extraction, conflict, chaos, and crisis management begins promoting instability itself.
Unfortunately, our collective capacity to confront these mounting crises is crippled by a fragmented political system of antagonistic nations ruled by corrupt elites who care more about power and wealth than people and the planet. As pressures intensify, the temptation to channel public frustration into nationalism, scapegoating, and geopolitical conflict intensifies.
How people respond to these pressures will shape humanity’s future. The challenges are monumental. They require us to question our identities, our values, and our loyalties like no other experience in our history. Who are we? Are we, first and foremost, human beings struggling to raise our families, strengthen our communities, and coexist with the other inhabitants of Earth? Or do our primary loyalties belong to our nation, our culture, our race, our ideology, or our religion? Can we put the survival of our species and our planet first, or will we allow ourselves to become hopelessly divided along national, cultural, racial, religious, or party lines?
The eventual outcome of this great implosion is still up for grabs. The future could be defined by deeper fragmentation, rising authoritarianism, and escalating conflict. But other possibilities remain open if we can overcome denial and despair; break our addiction to hydrocarbons; and pull together to loosen the grip of corporate power over our lives. Will we foster genuine democracy, harness renewable energy, reweave our communities, relearn forgotten skills, and heal the wounds we’ve inflicted on the Earth? Or will fear and prejudice drive us into hostile camps, fighting over the dwindling resources of a degraded planet? The stakes could not be higher.
Footnotes
1) Anabolism vs. Catabolism: In biology, anabolism refers to building tissues, while catabolism is the breaking down of tissues to release energy.
2) Subscription-based consumption shifts society from ownership toward ongoing rent-like dependency. Instead of paying once for durable goods, consumers maintain access through continuous payments across transportation, entertainment, software, housing services, food delivery, and physical products. Access replaces ownership, making consumers less able to accumulate assets while tying everyday life to recurring financial obligations. These models can sustain consumption despite stagnant wages, inequality, and high asset prices, but they also increase household fragility by raising fixed monthly costs, reducing savings, and deepening vulnerability to layoffs or interest-rate shocks.
3) In 2023, world debt (all outstanding loans waiting to be repaid plus interest) was a record $300 trillion. This is an astounding 349 percent over world GDP, and rising rapidly. This translates to $37,500 of average debt for each person in the world versus per capita GDP of just $12,000. Chan, Terry & Alexandra Dimitrijevic. “Global Debt Leverage: Is A Great Reset Coming?” S&P Global (Jan. 13, 2023.
4) Ronald Radosh, “Steve Bannon, Trump’s Top Guy, Told Me He Was ‘a Leninist’,” The Daily Beast, Aug. 22, 2016, available at
5) “AI Data Centers — Statistics & Facts,
6) Interview with Tucker Carlson: “Sam Altman on God, Elon Musk and the Mysterious Death of His Former Employee,”
7) A digital reputation score is a numerical metric that quantifies the public perception, credibility, and trustworthiness of an individual, brand, or organization online.
8) Predictive analytics transforms population monitoring and control by shifting governance from a reactive system to an anticipatory one. By combining massive, real-time datasets with machine learning, authorities can forecast human behavior, preempt crises, and influence societal outcomes before they occur. These capacities raise major societal and ethical concerns, particularly regarding algorithmic bias, the erosion of privacy, and the potential for digital determinism, where historical data unfairly dictates an individual’s future opportunities and freedoms.
9) A semiconductor chokepoint is a highly concentrated node in the global chip supply chain where a single company, country (like Taiwan), or specific technology monopolizes a critical step of production. Because microchip manufacturing is one of the most complex engineering feats in human history, certain steps cannot be bypassed or replicated easily. This gives the entities controlling them outsized geopolitical and economic leverage.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Craig Collins.